How Not To Procrastinate: 15 Tips
 By B.J. Addington

Wouldn’t you love to have 30 extra hours this year? You can. Stop wasting five minutes a day.

Now that you’re motivated, you’re more likely to admit that the best way to get something done is to begin it. Otherwise, tomorrow is always the busiest day of the week.

The latest incarnation of the age-old sin of procrastination is called “frazzing,” the frantic tendency to multi-task. Essentially, the “frazzer” masters the ability to do so much at once that nothing gets done. For the afflicted, it’s merely procrastination in disguise.

But long before frazzing, we all managed to procrastinate. We didn’t need cell phones, e-mail and one-click hyperlinks to put off to tomorrow what should be done today.

It doesn’t require an advanced degree in business administration to know that procrastination is a momentum killer, to say nothing of the opportunities it destroys by ultimately compressing a lot of time into the very little time that’s left.

There are as many reasons for procrastinating as there are procrastinators. However, there’s only one solution. Just do it.

OK, so you need a little help? Here are 15 ways to manage your tasks and your time and forever banish procrastination to the ash heap of outgrown bad habits.

1. Create a to-do list that gives tasks priority in order of importance, not in order of preference. Do the important stuff first, not last.

2. For each task, establish a deadline and hold to it. Without a deadline, you can be certain that the available work will expand to fill the available time.

3. Segment your workday into manageable periods of time. If you assign from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. to finish task X before taking on task Z, you are more likely to finish the one before starting the other.

4. Set aside specific times for particular tasks, like returning e-mails and phone calls. This protects against the tendency to avoid pressing duties in favor of more pleasant diversions.

5. Don’t dishonestly weigh down your to-do list with huge projects you rarely scratch off. Break projects down into incremental objectives that can be achieved while moving ahead on the over-arching project.

6. Don’t rely on your memory, which is a notoriously lousy watchman. Specifically track activities to plot your progress. Inertia can be overcome with incremental reminders that you’re advancing.

7. Periodically tally your wasted time. There’s nothing quite as convicting as seeing documented evidence that a precious commodity has been wasted and lost forever.

8. Focus on the results of what you do, rather than getting caught up in a frenzy of activity that achieves little. You’ll find that less effort can bring greater accomplishment.

9. When you travel, use the time wisely. A train commute is ideal for answering e-mail on your laptop, even if you can’t send your responses until you’re back in the office.

10. Practice responding promptly, whether it be to a phone message, a request received in the mail or a suggestion someone’s made at a business function. If the message, request or suggestion is worthwhile, why delay? If it’s not worth a timely response, perhaps it’s something that shouldn’t clutter your to-do list in the first place.

11. Be decisive. Learn to say no to people. And learn to say yes. You’ll find that decisions have a way of eliminating wasted time.

12. Procrastinating is rarely relaxing. It takes energy to kill time. Schedule time to truly relax. Refreshed, you’re less likely to waste good energy on bad habits.

13. If you can, delegate optional tasks that can be done by others and free yourself to concentrate on the things that demand your personal attention. Don’t put off productive work by whiling away your valuable time on incidentals.

14. Be courageous. You’ll either succeed or fail. Putting it off only delays the inevitable. A coward dies a thousand deaths.

15. Don’t insist on perfection. An unrealistically high expectation or standard creates dissatisfaction and frustration that results in paralysis. Rarely will anything be completely acceptable if perfection is your goal. And rarely will you advance.

Tomorrow you can celebrate National Procrastinators’ Day. Always tomorrow. Today, just do it.

(Posted April 2006)

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